“The United Nations sez”….
https://twitter.com/newstart_2024/status/1783207197217837104
There is no ‘climate crisis’. New technology is not a bad thing per se, what is repugnant is that industry & the political class are mandating one planet saving scam after another to fill their pockets & to impoverish the people.
Chris Stark says populist response and culture war around the term is inhibiting environmental progress
“It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it,” said Stark. “A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.”
The real fight was to make the UK’s economy competitive with other countries that were investing heavily in renewable energy, electric vehicles and other green technologies that were the focus of innovation and investment around the world, he said.
“If it [net zero] is only a slogan, if it is seen as a sort of holding pen for a whole host of cultural issues, then I’m intensely relaxed about dropping it,” he said. “We keep it as a scientific target, but we don’t need to use it as a badge that we keep on every programme.”
Stark gave the example of heat pumps, which have been demonised in some quarters despite offering a low-carbon and potentially low-cost alternative to gas boilers.
“It’s very strange that some see heat pumps as an enemy of the people,” he said, in an interview with the Guardian before leaving his post this Friday. “This is a remarkably sensible technology that we’ve known about for a long time, a straightforward technology to put in your house to keep it warm, or to keep it cool in the summer. But in this country, they’ve taken on a totally different totemic role, as a technology that is being somehow forced upon the populace. I think that’s very dangerous.”
Policymakers should focus instead on what lies behind net zero – investment in the UK’s economy, in ways that would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but cut energy use, improve national security, clean up the air and protect nature and the countryside, he added.
“We are talking about cleaning up the economy and making it more productive – you can call that anything you like,” Stark said.
He has been chief executive of the CCC, the statutory body that advises government under the 2008 Climate Change Act, since 2018, under the chair John Gummer (Lord Deben), the former Conservative environment minister. Stark, who will move to the Carbon Trust, a consultancy set up by the government to help businesses cut emissions, leaves at a time when the organisation is without a permanent chair, as Deben left last year and the devolved governments have rejected the Tories’ choice as the new chair.